  Mystery
This week: Chasing clues Edited by: Arakun the Twisted Raccoon  
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Quote for the week: "Investigation may be likened to the long months of pregnancy, and solving a problem to the day of birth. To investigate a problem is, indeed, to solve it."
~ Mao Zedong
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Crime dramas usually concentrate on the action and excitement of police work, but don't show the long hours investigators spend sifting through clues. While TV detectives routinely solve their cases in an hour, real life investigators often spend weeks or months gathering and interpreting evidence.
Forensic investigators say that a guilty person always leaves something behind and a crime scene and also takes something away. Finding what has been left behind or taken away is the first part of their job, and interpreting it is the second. For example, 100 hairs might be found at a crime scene. After the investigators collect and examine them all, they might find that 99 belonged to the victim and one to someone else. Does this mean that that person is the murderer? Maybe, but this is where the interpretation part comes in. If the hair belongs to a stranger who had no reason to be in the victim's home, the stranger will become a person of interest. However, if it belongs to the victim's significant other or a family member who was in the house all the time, it is probably meaningless as evidence.
Fingerprints have been used in criminal investigation since the 1800's, but they can't solve every crime. Maybe the criminal was smart enough to wear gloves or wipe down everything he touched. The fingerprints might be smudged or incomplete, or the criminal may have touched surfaces that do not take prints well. In some public places, there might be hundreds of fingerprints, making it impossible to isolate those of the guilty party. Even if you get a perfect print, it won't be useful unless you have a known suspect to compare it to. Police fingerprint databases only hold the prints of people who have been previously arrested. Some organizations, such as the military, routinely fingerprint all their personnel, but most members of the general public do not have their prints on file anywhere.
DNA evidence has revolutionized forensic investigation, but it can't solve every crime on its own. Like fingerprints, DNA is only useful if you have something to compare it to. In some cases, police have used the DNA of a family member to determine whether DNA they have found belongs to a missing person. This is possible because of structures called mitochondria which are present in most living cells. While the DNA in the nucleus of our cells comes from both parents, we get all our mitochondrial DNA from our mothers. Therefore, a mother and all her children will have the same mitochondrial DNA. DNA found at a crime scene could be compared to that of the mother or a sibling of the missing person to see if the mitochondrial DNA matches. DNA of the Y chromosomes is used in the same way to identify male subjects, since a father and all his sons will have the same Y chromosome.
The most difficult cases to solve are those where there seems to be no evidence. In some cases, it may not even look as if a crime has been committed. In these instances, one small thing that is out of place may give an alert observer a clue that something is wrong.
Something to try: Write a mystery story in which investigators have mountains of evidence to sift through and interpret.
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Mystery: November 23, 2016 Issue [#7989]
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